Marc Webb has revealed that he was looking to reinvent the character of Spider-Man in The Amazing Spider-Man.

The director said that he felt obliged to put his own stamp on the extensive material which already existed about the web-slinging superhero.

"[Spider-Man]'s been around since the 1960s," Webb told the Los Angeles Times. "The wealth of material here - whether it's story or character - is really profound but I also feel it's my responsibility to reinvent it in some ways."

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Webb went on to describe how he conceived of a fresh angle for the character.

"Peter Parker is a science whiz," Webb said. "If you look back to the early Stan Lee and Steve Ditko comics, he's a nerd with big glasses. The idea of what a nerd is has changed in 40 or 50 years. Nerds are no longer pariahs and knowing how to write computer code is no longer a [mocked] quality.

"What was important in those early comics was this notion that Peter Parker is an outsider and how we define that in a contemporary context."